BBC News World, March 19th.
Coronavirus: what says mathematical model that led the UK to radically change combating covid-19.
The British government's strategy against the coronavirus was based on the "mitigation" of the pandemic and the "herd immunization", or infection of a large part of the population, which in theory would develop collective immunity in order to protect all citizens.
But suddenly everything changed: a mathematical model presented by Imperial College in London gave an extremely gloomy picture of how the disease was going to spread across the country, how it was going to impact the public health system (the UK version of the Brazilian SUS, called NHS) and how many people were going to die.
And the message couldn't be clearer: either the strategy is changed, or more than 250,000 people will die from the new coronavirus, even if the system can serve all infected patients.
In the United States, this model shows that between 1 million and 1.2 million people can die from the coronavirus if immediate measures are not taken.
"It may be that we live in a very different world than we have known for a year or more," Neil Ferguson, head of the mathematical model program at Imperial College London, told the Financial Times.
Therefore, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, started talking about "suppression", which is the strategy that was used in China and that means to break the chain of contagion with the social distance of the entire population, instead "mitigation".
The WHO (World Health Organization) had already declared that if the option was not to do nothing, deaths in the United Kingdom could reach 510 thousand. Taking this into account, , in a first moment, we opted for the mitigation strategy, with the objective of not closing the country.
If the government continued with the mitigation model, however, not only would this number of deaths occur, but the health system would collapse.
"The suppression strategy is the only viable one," says the Imperial College study.
The model
To create this model, scientists, taking into account the experience of countries like China and South Korea, measured the three possible strategies to face the pandemic:
- Suppression: breaking the chains of transmission, trying to effectively stop the epidemic and reduce cases to the lowest possible number, as China did;
- Mitigation: accept that the coronavirus cannot be stopped and, therefore, reduce its spread and try to avoid as many cases of contagion as possible that would collapse the public health system. That was the strategy of the British government until this Monday, 16:
- Inaction: do nothing and let the coronavirus attack the entire population, generating collective immunity.
"What this model tells us is that we must reduce the curve of cases, with the certainty that we are not going to zero it," Patrick Vallance, the British government's scientific affairs adviser, told the BBC.
The research center's study starts from the scenario most similar to what humanity faced with a virus without an available vaccine: the 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu, when around 50 million people died around the world.
With this in mind, the model implemented by Imperial College to perform its measurement takes some variables such as the days of virus incubation (5.1 days), the average number of people who became infected per day, the control circumstances that existed when infected and mortality and recovery rates.
They also took into account, according to the data sent by each country, the policies that were implemented, such as: people who were quarantined for presenting symptoms, people who were isolated because they had contact with another infected person, social distance from people over 70 years of age, social distance from the entire population and the closure of schools and universities.
The specialists applied variables of time and number of infected people to each of these aspects and, above all, how they could impact the health system of the two countries, United Kingdom and USA, taking into account the beds available in each country.
Results
The results left experts baffled: if the two countries do not take action, the model shows that the peak of contagion will be reached in three months, will infect around 80% of the population and leave 510 thousand dead in the UK and around 2.2 million in the USA.
In addition, a collapsed health system.
With the contagion mitigation strategy, in addition to the 255 deaths in the UK and 1.2 million in the USA, the problem would be to maintain this health system for cases that are expected to occur in the long term.
"Our biggest conclusion of this model is that the mitigation strategy - the one that the British government was adopting - is not feasible because it supposes to be supported by a health system that would be surpassed in several numbers and in its recovery capacity", he says the document.
The data show that the suppression strategy, which is the mix of all these policies, would reduce the demand for medical attention by health services at the highest point of the crisis by "two thirds" and is "the right policy to address the pandemic".
"The social and economic effects to be able to adopt these measures will be profound because they will have to be financed over a period of time", says the text.
Finally, it indicates that many countries have already adopted this strategy to mitigate the impact on society and that even countries like the United Kingdom, where the coronavirus is at an incipient stage - in comparison with Italy and Spain - should adopt it imminently.
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